The report of the September 11 Commission, once a best seller and hailed by the news media as the definitive word on the subject, must now be moved to the fiction shelves.
The commission concluded, you'll recall, that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon couldn't have been prevented, and that if there was negligence, it was as much the fault of the Bush administration (for moving slowly on the recommendations of Clinton counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke) than of the Clinton administration.
Able Danger has changed all of that.
Able Danger was a military intelligence unit set up by Special Operations Command in 1999. A year before the September 11 attacks, Able Danger identified hijack leader Mohamed Atta and the other members of his cell. But Clinton administration officials stopped them -- three times -- from sharing this information with the FBI.
The problem was the order Clinton Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick made forbidding intelligence operatives from sharing information with criminal investigators.
The military spooks knew only that Atta and his confederates had links to al Qaeda. They hadn't unearthed their mission. But if the FBI had kept tabs on them (a big if, given the nature of the FBI at the time), September 11 almost certainly could have been prevented.
What may be a bigger scandal is that the staff of the September 11 Commission knew of Able Danger and what it had found, but made no mention of it in its report. This is as if the commission that investigated the attack on Pearl Harbor had written its final report without mentioning the Japanese.
The only dispute over Atta's whereabouts is whether he was in Prague on April 9, 2001, to meet with Samir al Ani, an Iraqi intelligence officer.
Czech intelligence insists he was. Able Danger, apparently, had information supporting the Czechs.
But acknowledging that possibility would leave open the likelihood that Saddam's regime was involved in, or at least had foreknowledge of, the September 11 attacks. And that would have been as uncomfortable for Democrats as the revelation that September 11 could have been prevented if it hadn't been for the Clinton administration's wall of separation.
The September 11 Commission wrote history as it wanted it to be, not as it was.
Forget about Cindy Sheehan. Forget about Rove. Obviously, the BIG STORY here is that the Dems lied. Again and again. Clinton's foreign policy and internal disdain for the intelligence community combined with Jamie Gorelick's incompetence led directly to 911. Further we now have proof of Iraq's complicity.
Hey Mrs. Sheehan, here is why we are in Iraq you jew-hater! It's because they helped in the 911 plot where 3000 Patriots lost their lives.
I sure hope the Jersey Girls are going to be out in front of this issue as their golden calf, Clinton, gets gorelicked!
eta: Hey Ty, where was Richard Clarke on this??!?!? How come he didn't cite Atta specifically to Bush??!!?
